Pesher Habakkuk. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Many thanks to the editors of Ancient Jew Review for the invitation to write a retrospective. Amidst the busyness of an academic life, one seldom pauses to reflect on what one has achieved. It is a pleasure to look back over what I have published and the contributions that I have made to various fields. I say “fields” in the plural, because I do not confine myself to one specialism. I see disciplinary boundaries as necessary but also arbitrary. One could not research on canonization, for instance, by restricting oneself to a specialist sub-area.
The invitation is to reflect on my contribution to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Judaism, so I will leave out other fields to which I have also contributed, including the study of the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, Hellenistic Judaism, New Testament, and Rabbinics. I will reflect on my contribution to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and research on the canon.
I recently published The Earliest Commentary on the Prophecy of Habakkuk (2020) in the Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls series, for which I also serve as series editor. This volume is the first major commentary of 1QpHab in English for forty years. It is a commentary on an ancient commentary and it publishes a new edition of Pesher Habakkuk, showing that the pesher is a complete and coherent commentary, written as an exhortation for a sectarian community disappointed by the passing of the expected end-time. To do so, I began by establishing the text of 1QpHab, since there is no edition of it in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. I used the excellent images of 1QpHab on the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem website as my main source for reading the whole scroll and reconstructing certain damaged parts. I focused on the poetics of the pesher, showing how the biblical quotations of Habakkuk and the sectarian comments are two strands of a single interpretative cord. I advanced a new solution to the vexed problem of the identity of the wicked priest, suggesting that it is a title that applies to the last three Hasmonean high priests.
This volume develops my long-standing interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1997, I investigated the scriptural quotations of two comparable corpora in Holy Scripture in the Qumran Commentaries and Pauline Letters, showing how important it was to take account of the fluidity of the biblical texts in the centuries around the turn of the era in any assessment of the textual form of scriptural citations. The Pesherists and Paul quoted holy scriptures, sometimes in a form that differed from the Masoretic Text and Septuagint, but was attested in the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. The study was technical, as it needed to be, and it built on Emanuel Tov's multiple text-theory that the biblical text has more than just the three text-types of the Masoretic Text, Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint. My study was programmatic for Qumran research in showing the importance of studying all the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical, non-biblical and sectarian, together. Qumran scholarship before that time was largely divided between those who studied the biblical texts and those who investigated the sectarian and other scrolls.
In subsequent publications, I showed that the Pesharim and Pauline letters belong to the sectarian matrix of Second Temple Judaism. They often used the same techniques and followed very similar hermeneutical principles. They understood that prophecy was fulfilled in their own time and community. They frequently trained their interpretative scope on the same biblical texts and drew lessons from them that were sometimes different, and sometimes commensurate, if not identical. For instance, the Pesherist and Paul quoted the half-verse of Hab 2:4b and interpreted it to mean that faithfulness in the teachings of Jesus or the Teacher of Righteousness would deliver the believer from judgment.
In a 2002 publication, I extended my study to all the pesharim. My book, Pesharim, examined both the continuous and thematic pesharim, showing that “pesher” refers both to a genre and method of scriptural interpretation, just like midrash. The pesher is a distinctive genre of exegesis; it is neither generic nor unique. Moreover, the genre of the pesher is more diverse than is commonly thought, and the pesharim fall along a continuum of scriptural interpretation ranging from inner-biblical exegesis to Rabbinic midrashim.
I have also contributed to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls in other ways. In 1997, I edited and published the The Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Reference Library, volume 1 using the latest technology that was available then. I was the principal editor of five fragmentary scrolls, 4Q303-307, for the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series, XX and XXXVI (1997, 2000). I co-edited with John J. Collins, The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls (2010), a standard work of reference. I edited two conference volumes on the scrolls, The Dead Sea Scrolls in their Historical Context (2000) and On Scrolls, Artefacts, and Intellectual Property (2001), the latter became a standard textbook in copyright law. Finally, I wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls. A Very Short Introduction (2017), which has been translated into eight languages and made into an audiobook by Audible.com and Audiobooks.com.
The other focus of my publications is the study of the way certain texts came to be included in the collection of authoritative scriptures that we call the Hebrew Bible. In 2013, I published The Formation of the Jewish Canon, a historical study in which I built on a study by John Collins and showed that the canon of Rabbinic Judaism was the canon of one Jewish sect, the Pharisees. I called this view “the theory of the majority canon,” because the Pharisees made up the majority of those who re-founded the religion of Jews after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, and it was consequently their canon that became the canon of Rabbinic Judaism.
Before the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism, there were different collections of authoritative scriptures held by different communities at different times. In the Persian period the Judaean community that returned from exile had “the Torah” and this referred to a collection of six books, from Genesis to Joshua, sometimes designated the Pentateuch plus Joshua or the Hexateuch. In the Hellenistic period, the Alexandrian community reflected in the diegesis, known as Aristeas, had a collection of “divine laws” or “the laws of the Jews” that they translated from Hebrew into Greek, and they ascribed the translation project to Ptolemy Philadelphus. Likewise, in the second century BCE, the scribal curriculum of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira and its Prologue included two authoritative collections called “the Law” and “the Prophets”. There is also an open-ended third collection, called “the wisdom of all the ancients” (Sir 39:1) and “the other books of our ancestors” (Prologue), which included among other ancient writings the Wisdom of Ben Sira itself and its literary memorial to Simon (Sir 50:1-24).
Undoubtedly, the most important contribution to canon research is the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Discovered by Bedouin goat-herders in 1947, William F. Albright famously described the Dead Sea Scrolls as “the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times”. The Essene communities reflected behind the sectarian scrolls did not have a developed concept of canon. Their understanding of the incipient canon is better described as “authoritative texts”, since they did not just validate texts that were eventually included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible. They thought that their own writings, like the pesharim, were also divinely inspired and authoritative. Moreover, they held that the book of Jubilees was an authoritative perush, or explanation of the law of Moses (CD 16:1-3). I characterize the Essenes' understanding as “the dual and graded authority of scriptures.” They held up the traditional scriptures of Israel, with distinct collections of the Pentateuch and prophecies, but also considered their own sectarian compositions on a sliding scale of authority.
By the end of the first century CE, there was a canon in all but the strictest sense. The combined attestation of Josephus, 4 Ezra, Mishnah Yadayim, and the Bryennios list is strong evidence for the emergence of the canon. This canon was the canon of the Pharisees that was adopted by the Rabbis in their re-founding of Judaism after 70. The Pharisees became the dominant force in Jewish society during the revolt against Rome, and it was their canon that became the canon of Rabbinic Judaism. This canon was not the canon of other Jews, but the books included on this list were also considered authoritative by other non-Pharisaic communities, like the Essenes.
My research into the formation of the Jewish canon extended to philosophical and theological approaches. In 2017, I edited When Texts are Canonized, a collection of essays that probed the canonical process and consequence of canonization from different perspectives. My own contribution, entitled “An Indicative Definition of the Canon,” argued for a different way of thinking about the canonical process. Drawing on the insights of analytical philosophy, I suggested that the formation of the canon should not be understood by a criterial logic, with a set of external norms, but rather by indicative logic. The books that were eventually included in the canon share “family resemblances” with other books left out of the canon. For instance, just as the same eye colour can be found in people belonging to unrelated families, so too the story of Israel is evident in canonical and non-canonical books.
Finally, a retrospect in the strict sense refers to the past, but it is a past that continues in the present and will follow on in the future. I have embarked on a new project that combines my interest in texts and canon. This research focuses on the canonization of one book, the Song of Songs, and its reception history in Jewish and Christian tradition to just after the mediaeval period. A preliminary foray into the topic was given as an invited plenary lecture at the International Organization for Old Testament Study, Aberdeen, 2019, “Contextual Readings of the Song of Songs in the Pre-Modern Period,” which will appear soon in Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, Aberdeen Congress Volume (forthcoming). I guest edited a volume on the theme of “The Normativity of the Torah” in an issue of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel that will appear this year. My own study in the volume investigates the little discussed topic of Josephus' criticism of the biblical arrangement, entitled “Implicit Criticism of Scriptures and Josephus’ Rewritten Bible.” My primary editing task is to see through the publication of the volumes in the Oxford Commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The second volume of the series, on the Damascus Document by Steven Fraade, has just been published.
I look forward to many more years of contributing to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Judaism, topics that have fascinated me and continue to pique my research interests.
Timothy H. Lim is Professor of Hebrew Bible & Second Temple Judaism at New College, University of Edinburgh.